Learning How to Use Another Curation Tool

I have been having a lot of fun using the various curation tools that are available and trying to choose the best one for the job at hand. Last school year, I created a wiki for the school's annual social studies fair project. I spent so much time working with the middle school students that I felt that I was neglecting the high school students. The wiki allowed me to be in everyone's class at the same time. I even created some instructional videos that I embedded in the wiki so that the students could receive some direct teaching. The wiki was such a success that I used Livebinders to create a binder for the science classes as they navigated the independent research project (IRP) that was required in all high school science classes.

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Last week, I searched for a tool that would more visual and less dependent on text. The members of Bookmarked are writing reviews for SLJ Teen twice a month. I wanted to find a place online where I could save the links and then share with the students, parents and teachers. At first, I thought that Pinterest would work. It is so visual, and each review is accompanied by pictures. When I tried to upload the pages that I wanted to save to Pinterest, no images were found. This was a big disappointment because Pinterest is really beautiful, and I wanted the reviews to stand out. So I had to go back to the drawing board. I ventured to my Delicious to see what sites I had tagged "curation tools" to see what else might work for me. I had read about Sqworl, but I had never thought about using it. It is certainly not as beautiful as Pinterest, but you do get thumbnails of each saved website. After creating my account and adding a new group, it was a snap to upload the pages with the reviews. Now every two weeks, after I add the new reviews, I can share the link to my Sqworl group with the students. It acts as an archive, so anyone can go back in time and read every review that the students have written. Here is a link to the Sqworl. If you want to read only the latest reviews, then click on the box that says Book Reviews September 5 2012.

PS: The one thing that you cannot do is embed a Sqworl in your blog or website. Too bad, that feature would make it really awesome.